


Vault 9

by 28ghosts



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallout, Canonical Character Death, Ensemble Cast, F/M, don't think about the worldbuilding too hard; I sure didn't
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 11:38:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15460557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/pseuds/28ghosts
Summary: After a devastating attack on his previous home, Benjamin Sisko and his son cross the Wastes on their way to a new one.(DS9, in the style of Fallout 4. Playing fast and loose with the Fallout setting; no knowledge of Fallout 4 needed; some Fallout 4 spoilers.)





	Vault 9

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the Fallout games pre-2018. Content warnings for use of IV-administered drugs.
> 
> Only things you should need to know about Fallout are: It takes place hundreds of years after a nuclear war; synths are robots that replace people sometimes; drugs like RadAway can be used to treat radiation poisoning; a company called VaultTec helped some people survive the war through measures like cryogenic freezing. That should be it!

Jake has gotten better about sleeping while it’s light out; Sisko hasn’t. He can sleep if it’s just him on his own, holing himself up in some ghoul-haunted outpost, but if Jake’s there with him, it’s different. Never mind that with Wolf still overrun, this old broadcast station is objectively safer; never mind that even if some roaming Deathclaws scented them, the metal doors would still hold. His son is with him, and that makes it hard to sleep.

Sisko manages a few hours with his back against the door and his pistol in one hand. (Quicker to fire with than the shotgun.) He wakes any time there’s a strange noise -- birds screeching, mostly, though sometimes the strange feral yowling that could belong to anything. Jake sleeps like he’s been knocked out.

Night falls. Jake wakes up. He winces when Sisko slips the needle in for his RadAway, but he’s old enough now that he refuses bribery for it. Thirteen already. Jake grinds his jaw while the medication runs through him. “You better not have been lying about bringing some for you, too,” he says, when Sisko slips the needle out.

“Never,” Sisko says. “What use would there be getting us to the vault just for me to keel over, hmm?”

“Seems like something you might do,” Jake says.

It’s mostly teasing, Sisko knows, but his smile back to his son is still forced. Jake _worries_ about him, more and more as he gets older. Sisko folds the empty plastic of the RadAway around the used needle and puts it aside. He’s packed lightly -- the Federation agent who’d contacted him promised the vault had anything he or Jake would need -- but of course he’d taken RadAway. He pulls out another dose of it from his pack. “How about you do the honors, huh?”

Jake grimaces, but he takes the RadAway. Sisko extends one arm. Jake rips open a pack of sterilizer, and he does everything perfectly. Sisko is so proud he barely even feels the sting of old pre-war medicine coursing through him.

*

“That you?” someone says, when Sisko opens the broadcast station doors. “I mean, er, code gamma twelve or whatnot.”

“You must be Chief O’Brien,” Sisko guesses into the dark -- and prays he’s right. It’s the correct code, but with the Institute and its powers, it’s hard to know.

“Aye, sir.” Someone steps out from behind a shed, stocky and steady. “Federation Chief O’Brien at your service.”

And following him, a gravelly voice, like a ghoul: “Constable Odo Ital.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Sisko says. “Shall we?”

“I thought there’d be more than just you,” Odo says. He steps forward, into the scant light cast by stars through cloud cover. “Was I mistaken?”

Finally, Sisko relaxes -- the last step of their pre-negotiated system of codes and bluffs, done. “All good, Jake,” he says.

He hears footsteps from the stairwell behind him. “Dumb last codeword,” Jake mumbles.

“That’s why it’s smart,” Sisko says, even as he reaches for Jake’s hand. “Hard to imitate, if everything else is different.”

“Hopefully,” says O’Brien. Sisko’s eyes have adjusted a bit, and he can see the familiar colorblocking of a Federation uniform, and the shadow of a rifle over one shoulder. “Nothing’s foolproof.”

“Harder for two synths to pass than just one, though,” says the Constable.

It’s him who Sisko stares at in the dark. If he hadn’t been warned, he wouldn’t have known. A synth willing to help the Federation -- stranger things have happened, but not ones Sisko has ever been willing to trust at face value.

Not that he has much of a choice now, though. He adjusts how his pack is slung over his back, and he squeezes Jake’s hand. “Lead on,” he says.

Odo nods, and into the dark of the forests they go.

*

Three days’ travel to the vault. Sisko and Jake had managed a day of it on their own. With Odo and Miles, they make it just before daylight to an old train station occupied only by rabid dogs, easy to dispatch of with a few cracks of Sisko’s shotgun.

It had only been Sisko and Jake to make it to _their_ vault. Jennifer had been just seconds behind them -- she should have made it. If anything anyone had known about Vault-Tec had been true, then Jennifer would have made it, but -- but.

Sisko had woken up so _many_ years later with a four-year-old held close to him, frost thawing from his eyelashes. Shotgun still slung over his back. Had to bash its handle into a couple creeps’ heads to keep them off Jake. Still didn’t know what they’d been after, but whatever it’d been, they hadn’t gotten it. Unless they’d meant to get themselves killed, in which case good riddance. Same shotgun Sisko had carried with him ever since.

Hopefully Jake didn’t remember Sisko picking over the bleached bones outside the vault door. Trying to figure out which skull had been hers. He dreams of it nearly every night, trying to imagine what her last minutes would have been like, then himself, his fingertips skimming over smooth white bone.

Sometimes he thinks that it should have been him to die, but if he’d had the choice, would he have chosen for her to see their world like this? He doesn’t know.

They take shifts in doubles, except for Jake, who pretends to sleep more than he sleeps, as far as Sisko can tell. Odo and Sisko take first shift, then Sisko and Miles, then Miles and Odo. It’s Jake to shake him awake. Thin pink light thrown over everything, Sisko feels nauseated as he sits up. Jake insists on Sisko getting his RadAway first. Sisko lets him, then administers in turn.

“Good to know,” Jake says.

Maybe the RadAway is still kicking in; maybe it’s not. The latter option would be worse. It takes a little bit of time for Sisko to feel like himself. It’s probably nothing.

Just another day of wandering. Just another day, and Jake is safe. At least for a little while.

*

He’d met Jennifer in the military. He’d been a soldier; she’d been a scientist. A normal enough love story, truth be told. She’d been the one nervous about their nuclear-powered car parked so close to the nursery, even while he’d laughed about it. Everyone else had done it, after all, for years and years. What was she worried about, that their child would be born with extra eyes? The ability to lift objects with his mind?

She’d looked indignant when he’d mentioned it, said, “Maybe! Who knows, Benjamin?”

No one calls him that anyone. It’s “stranger” or “Commander Sisko” or “Dad” and that’s it.

*

At some point in their walking, there’s a suspicious _crack_ , and Sisko halts, drawing his pistol the same moment Miles and Odo do the same. Odo ahead of him and Jake, Miles behind.

Then the steady chuffing of mutant mongrels -- trying to communicate, trying to strategize. “Watch your boy’s back,” Miles says, as he draws his rifle up, and then _something_ lunges--

Maybe Sisko looks to the synth Constable first, so be it.

For a moment, the Constable glows. The nanobots that constitute him pulse and swirl, and his form goes liquid. Sisko keeps himself between Jake and the mongrels. Odo and Miles make short, bloody work of them.

It’s hard to look at Odo the same way after that. It’s one thing to know a man’s not just a synth, but the shifting sort, too, and it’s another to see it in action.

More hours and hours of walking, listening. 

Jake doesn’t complain. He’s a braver boy that Sisko was at his age. He drags his feet, yes, and doesn’t hide his mouth when he yawns, but he’s too big to carry these days, and the forest has started to thin out. O’Brien is more at ease, still taking the world in by his scope every forty paces, yes, but with less of a white-knuckled grip on his stock.

Sisko still keeps his free hand on the hilt of his pistol, his other wrapped around Jake’s wrist hard enough it would take a hell of a shock for him to let go.

The forest thins out more and more. It stops being so much reassuring that no one lies in wait and unnerving that someone could sight them all from a distance. Sisko’s only consolation is that Odo still leads the way. Even from a distance, Sisko can see the way Odo has changed: the eyes -- optical sensors, more strictly -- that run up his arms like radiation sores.

Ahead of them, Odo halts; O’Brien does, too, and raises a hand. Sisko grips Jake’s hand more tightly, and Jake freezes, wide-eyed.

This isn’t the sort of world to raise a child in. But hell if he’d let Jennifer down.

Odo holds still where he stands. He gestures some way, and the eyes disappear. Yips, like coyote mongrels, echo through the scant brush around them.

Miles swears under his breath. “Nerys,” he growls. “Really.”

Someone laughs behind them; before he knows he’s reacting, Sisko is whirling on his heel, pistol in hand. It’s good he doesn’t fire as quickly as he used to -- it’s a Bajoran woman, grinning wryly, a rocket launcher on her shoulder. “You must be Commander Sisko,” she says. “Kira Nerys.” She inclines her head.

When Miles merely sighs, evidently aggrieved but not surprised, Sisko holsters his pistol. He nods. “Benjamin Sisko,” he says.

He doesn’t introduce Jake. Kira doesn’t seem to take it personally. “I’ll take your flank,” she says, matter-of-fact. “Systems indicate you might have some admirers.”

“Alert us if you need backup,” Miles says.

“I won’t,” Kira says, “need backup, that is.”

The way she disappears into the brush is uncanny. When Sisko turns back to Miles, Jake holds his hand a little more readily.

Miles rolls his eyes. “Insufferable. We’re just a bit more than a kilometer away now, Commander.”

“Alright, then. Lead on.”

“Aye.” Miles’s rifle stays braced against his shoulder same as ever. Sisko likes that in a man: refusal to act like it’s safe until it really is.

They catch up to Odo, back to pretending to be human. The smoothness of his features is still uncanny. “Sorry for the scare, Commander,” the synth says. “It’s...a security measure of Nerys’s.”

“And a good one,” Miles grants.

“No apology needed,” Sisko says. “If you have a system that works for you, I trust your judgement.” For now.

It’s apparently the right thing to say. Odo even seems to smile. “Very well, then.”

Even the brush thins out. In the distance is a dark space against a cliff, and as they grow closer, Miles walks backwards, sighting the treeline through his scope. At some point there’s a flash in the distance that Sisko notices only because his own shadow briefly darkens. Neither Miles nor Odo breaks step, though he feels Jake’s hand clench around his. He squeezes back reassuringly. “Not much longer, Jake-o.”

He glances at Jake, who nods resolutely.

The darkness grows sharper at its edges: a cave. Odo pulls a flashlight from his bag and leads. There’s a narrow flight of stairs carved into rock. “Watch your step,” Odo says, as he leads. “It gets...slippery.”

“You first, Jake.”

Jake isn’t happy about it, but he follows Odo.

There’s a faint light at the end of the stairs. It gets a little bit brighter with every step. This can’t be it, Sisko thinks dizzily. For a moment, the whole world seems to slip away. He feels as if he’s sleeping and about to wake up to Jennifer leaning over him, concerned: “Bad dream?” he can all but hear her say.

Oh, you can’t imagine, he thinks. The worst dream I’ve ever had.

There’s a narrow metal pathway that leads to a platform. Odo dials something into his Pip-Boy and presses a cord to the interface. Jake gasps as the metal wall rolls away.

A walkway extends towards the light. Odo turns to Sisko, and he says, “Welcome, Commander, to Vault 9.”

**Author's Note:**

> so, er, this is left as a multi-chaptered fic just because i love this universe and would love to toy more with it. if you have any suggestions/prompts please!! hmu here or on [tumblr](https://adigeon.tumblr.com/ask)


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